


Light Perception

by luthienne



Category: Daredevil (Comics), Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Angst, Catholicism, Character Study, Date Rape Drug/Roofies, Drama, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fix-It of Sorts, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Matt Murdock & Foggy Nelson Friendship, Matt Murdock Needs a Hug, Post-Season/Series 03, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Prison, Protective Foggy Nelson, Recovery, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-23
Updated: 2019-03-23
Packaged: 2019-11-28 22:45:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18214658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luthienne/pseuds/luthienne
Summary: Fisk gets put away again, and it feels like that should be the end of it, but it’s not. Of course it’s not. The FBI needs a win. Who better to take that out on than the lawyers who exposed their corruption.I am not Daredevil,Matt says so many times in so many spaces that he almost believes it.His ability to maintain a concept of self was difficult enough before this; this new judgment day, this thing that has fractured his concept of self beyond what he thought was possible.He feels like he’s been dropped into the ocean, all his limbs weighted with stones, unable to find which way is up and which way is down, which way is surface and which way is gone. Surface feels like a fairy-story told to children at night, like enchanted forests.Light as the breadcrumbs which lead the way up, which lead the way out.





	Light Perception

**Author's Note:**

> “There are things unbearable.”  
> —Anne Carson, _Decreation_

  **I**.

 

The moment Wilson Fisk steps up to the podium, flanked by his team, more imposing than ever, heartbeats stutter and crescendo across the city, a frenetic, dissonant exposition—and Matt thinks he understands a little bit more now why crowds nearly rioted at the premiere of a ballet once, overwhelmed by its relentless unpredictability, by its apostasy.

_The pagans onstage made pagans of the audience._

The memory of Fisk’s voice doesn’t even hold a candle to the reality of it. Makes his hands curl into fists, takes him right back. If his memory had been a candle, then the reality is a forest fire: violent, irredeemable.

“…to frame me.  _Daredevil._ The killer who’s now showing—his true colors. Who’s tried to murder people in newspaper offices—and churches. Attacking our sacred institutions.  _Believe—me. Daredevil_ is our  _true_ — _public_ — _enemy_.”

It feels like he’s caught in the crossfire of feedback from every television set in the borough, the fractional delay of sound just offset enough to make it seem as though Fisk’s voice carries beyond the restraints of sound and time, as though his power is truly limitless.

The gasps that follow the speech, the uptick in heart rates, the sharp smell of sweat glands and fear arousal overwhelm Matt’s senses as he parses through the confused and conflicted responses across the streets:  _truth, truth, truth, it can’t be true, can it be true—_

A stuttering swan song of disbelief; it doesn’t matter, he thinks, it  _really doesn’t matter_ what he does, how much he does, who he tries to be—a few seeds of doubt, a handful of words, and the people he calls his own turn on him, just like that.

A half-measure; a man who can’t finish the job. One bad day away from becoming the villain of his own story. One bad day away from becoming—

No. Nausea battles with rage inside of him, both suppressing the feeling that he’s not enough, he’ll never  _be enough,_  and maybe Castle was right: the system is broken, his work as Matt Murdock is futile, almost as pointless as his work as Daredevil— _not enough_.

He imagines for a moment what it would look like to team up with Castle, to end this—once and for all, for better or for worse, ‘til death do us part; an unholy marriage of the Devil and the Punisher. How disappointing that his old teacher fell before he got the chance to see the ruthlessness that he’d always hoped of finding in Matt.

He clenches his teeth together, feels the dried blood crack around his jawline, and picks himself up from the edge of the rooftop to meet Foggy and Karen.

It takes him less time than he hopes it’ll take to arrive, barely exhilarated from the thrill of darting from roof to roof, the chasm of empty spaces below him, the promise of adrenaline that comes with every moment that he taunts death, and fear, and his own limitations.

“So, I guess you needed my help, after all,” Foggy says smugly, with, to his credit, just a trace of the bitterness that usually accompanies his words. Since that day. Judgment day. When the secrets came pouring out from Matt’s wounds. So, he swallows his pride as Karen steps onto the rooftop after Foggy.

“Yeah,” Matt says. “Yeah, I did, Foggy. You’re right.”

He doesn’t add that Karen nearly died because Foggy involved her, because he gave her the idea to confront Fisk, because he did exactly what Matt told him not to do. He doesn’t add it because he finally understands that there is no protecting each other, finally understands that good intentions only pave the way to hurt and hell, anyway. (Source: he’s the Devil.)

Fisk’s voice is still echoing in his mind, as present as the hallucination of Fisk that’s been following him around since he survived the building collapsing on top of him weeks ago.

He wonders briefly if that’s one of those things he’s supposed to share with Foggy and Karen to keep them from leaving, another judgment day in which Matt’s reticence to burden his friends will only cause them to leave, anyway. Damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t.

_“…proud to announce the justice has prevailed, and Wilson Fisk is once again a free man—"_

The worst part, thinks Matt, was not the speech, itself—the worst part was listening as the heckling faded into rapt silence, as gasps greeted the accusation against Daredevil, as the rapid click of camera shutters stuttered into stillness, as Fisk was once again believed. He fights back the nausea that rises in his throat. Ten steps behind,  _always_ ten steps behind—

“Do you have any idea how much life has sucked for Karen and me,” Foggy interrupts his thoughts, “while you were, just, off doing your own thing?”

All Matt’s ever tried to do is the right thing, and all Matt’s ever seemed to do is get it wrong.

“No, but I’m sorry, Foggy,” he says, feeling the utter inadequacy of words yet again to bridge the chasm in their friendship, to take the place of all the things he could never even hope to express. “Maybe I was, was wrong to push you away.”

“Ok, it’s  _extremely_ hard to fight with you if you keep agreeing with me,” says Foggy, and Matt can tell that his heart is almost in the quip, almost—

“Good,” says Matt, “because I don’t want to fight with you.” He exhales, holds himself still for a moment, gathering his courage. “Look, the way I’ve treated you—the way I’ve treated you both—you deserve better.”

Foggy sucks in a breath. “Yes,” Matt can hear Foggy’s voice change direction toward Karen, sense the air moving as she nods in affirmation, “We did.”

“You did,” Matt practically says over Foggy, as though trying to say it at the same time, as though feeling the words in his own throat as Foggy’s larynx lowers and raises in his throat.

“But so did you.”

For a moment, the words don’t register with Matt over the expectation to be reproached, berated. His head tilts in confusion, and a nervous smile pulls at the corners of his mouth.

“I, Fog, what’re you,” Matt says, the words faltering as they tumble out on top of each other.

“Listen, Matt,” says Foggy, and his voice is doing that thing where it sounds somehow both resigned and determined. “I pushed you away, too, after everything that went down with—you know,” he stumbles, not wanting to say Elektra’s name. “But it wasn’t fair,” he says quickly, to stave off Matt’s forthcoming apology. “It wasn’t fair to leave you alone like that after she showed up again. I just, I still remember that night at Co—”

“Foggy,” interrupts Matt, as he hears Karen’s heart rate begin to beat faster in confusion, in concern, in interest. “We don’t, we don’t have to do this. Just, just if you can let me try to do better, give me another chance, that’s all I need to hear.”

"No, Matt," says Foggy. "I'm just trying to say that I know your relationship with Elektra is complicated, has always been complicated, and God knows you probably never learned anything about healthy relationships since your childhood was so  _supremely_ fucked up—"

Matt lets out a bark of laughter.

“Look,” Foggy continues. “What I’m trying to say is that I’m sorry, too. You were alone, and I know that you thought I’d— _we’d—_ be safer that way, thanks to your own personal, asshole Mr. Miyagi but—whoa, Matt, are you ok? What’d I say?”

He must look like he had gotten punched in the gut at the mention of his teacher; Matt certainly feels winded, and breathless, and incapable of explaining why. He licks his lips, as though forcing his tongue into motion will pave the way for the words to follow.

“Stick, uh, he died, Foggy. She, Elektra—she killed him,” he says quietly, as though saying it out loud doesn’t make him feel like he might shatter into a thousand pieces. He’s barely a person already, he thinks, there’s no way he can survive another blow, another hit like that.

“Jesus, Matt,” says Foggy, and Matt can suddenly taste salt in the air. He focuses back into the present, can sense Karen’s body quivering with emotion as wisps of her hair are caught in the wind and swept across her face, catching the tears on her cheeks.

Foggy is—Foggy is stoic, which is unlike him, and uncertain, which is more like him. His heartbeat ticks up anxiously, and Matt suddenly feels like he should have kept all of this to himself, rather than burden them with the task of grieving the deaths of the ones who stole Matt away from them before they ever had a chance.

“It’s, uh, it is what it is,” he says gruffly. “I thought I could help her. I thought I could, I don’t know, but,” he shakes his head and laughs, a sound that is entirely joyless. “I couldn’t.”

“Oh, Matt,” says Karen, and suddenly she’s stepping toward him and Matt is doing that thing where he scrunches his face and struggles not to let the tears slip out from the corners of his eyes and it breaks Foggy’s heart, but that stupid wall between them, it just, it stops him in his tracks.

“So,” says Karen, after a long moment of tense silence. “Where do we go from here?”

“I don’t want to leave you,” Matt says slowly, “but I can’t ask you to be accomplices to what I have to do now.”

The words linger in the air between them, a challenge, as Karen shifts her head away from Matt, frustration in every gesture of her body. Foggy looks between them, then settles on Karen; it’s not like his glares have ever worked on Matt before.

“What’s  _that_ supposed to mean?” he asks, already pretty sure that he doesn’t want to know.

“Um,” Karen hesitates, then bites the bullet. “Matt wants to kill Fisk.”

“That building falling on you really did mess with your head,” Foggy growls, and it’s punctuated by a sharp gesture with his fingers. Matt seems unaffected by his anger, and his gesticulating, and it only serves to make Foggy more infuriated.

“We put him in prison, Fog, and look what happened,” Matt says, and Foggy hates that he is able to sound calm, and rational, and unaffected while discussing his intention to become a murderer. Only Matt “no chill” Murdock could go from altar boy to Punisher in sixty seconds flat, he thinks snidely.

“It’s not gonna be the same this time,” Foggy argues. “This time, he’ll be thrown into some kind of supermax hole where he can’t compromise anybody. He’ll never see the light of day again!”

“Foggy, I  _know_ you’re not that naïve—” Matt begins to say.

“It’s called having faith in the system,” Foggy interrupts. “Something  _you_ used to have—”

“No, Foggy, it’s called facing reality,” Matt snaps. “The reality that some men are just too rich and powerful for the system. Men like Fisk that take the law and twist it into something that  _protects_ them.”

_“No, Matt_ _,”_  Foggy bites back. _“_ _This isn’t you._ There’s another way to do this, we just, if you can just, I don’t know, take a step back from the  _murder_   _ledge_  for one freaking second!”

“Matt, just, hear him out, maybe,” Karen says, her voice placating but pinched, raw.

“Fine,” Matt laughs, and the sound is short, and bitter. “Tell me how  _the_   _law_  can  _possibly_  fix this, Foggy. I’m all ears. Sure. Tell me your plan.”

"Ok, simple, step one," says Foggy slowly. "We do this together. Step two, we devise a plan  _together._ Step three, we, we execute said plan. Together."

“Wow,” responds Matt, suppressing the feeling of powerlessness that is bubbling up inside of him of like a poison, threatening to spill out in any form that he allows it. “That’s genius. You come up with that on your own?”

”Yeah, well, so I’m still working out the details,“ Foggy says, but his too casual tone only belies the uptick in his heart rate, which Matt  _knows_ is a sign that Foggy is also starting to lose his patience with the conversation.

“Ok, ok, ok, what about this—we, we find ourselves another witness,” Karen interjects, recognizing all the telltale signs of a fight about to erupt between Matt and Foggy. “Someone that will flip on Fisk, but, unlike Jasper Evans, we keep them alive this time. Someone who knows the details of Fisk’s operation. Someone with everything to lose.”

"No," says Matt, swallowing back the memory of what happened at the church. "Someone with  _everything_ to lose."

“Nadeem,” says Karen, her breath quickening. “He helped me get away.”

“Yeah,” says Matt. “His family’s in danger, he probably went back to move them. I need to go. Now. Foggy—do you think Brett would be willing to help Nadeem’s family?”

“Already on it,” Foggy mumbles, and Matt can hear his fingertips tapping the screen of his phone. Pulling the mask back over his head, Matt rolls his shoulders back and starts jogging across the rooftop, gaining momentum as he goes until he’s leaping over and across.

 

—

 

In some ways, it feels like Matt never stopped running.

Fisk gets put away again, and it feels like that should be the end of it, but it’s not. Of course it’s not. The FBI needs a win. Who better to take that out on than the lawyers who exposed their corruption.

_Daredevil. Our true—public—enemy._

They’ve gathered enough evidence that there’s not much Foggy can do other than insist on protective custody for Matt, on the grounds that he’s blind and has no business being placed in general population with the rest of the violent offenders.

_I am not Daredevil_ _,_  Matt says so many times in so many spaces that he almost believes it.

The days following his indictment are a blur of promises and threats; his nights are filled with a crushing emptiness where words used to be.

 

**II.**

 

It takes only one night in prison for Matt Murdock to realize that his luck has finally caught up with him; it takes thirty-two nights to fully understand what that means.

Thirty-two nights of caged men screaming and banging and taunting and singing, prisoners doing anything they can to alleviate their boredom, their anger; of the stench and the noise of convicted inmates mixed in with others, like Matt, who are just awaiting trial; thirty-two nights of listening to choked sobs, murmurs and threats, favors and retributions.

It takes thirty-two days and nights with little sleep, and less food. Then it finally happens—the transfer from protective custody to general population.

Matt’s almost looking forward to it: the freedom from the oppressive hum of surveillance cameras always watching,  _always_ , so that he must act the part of helpless blind attorney every moment of every day and every night, or risk losing his case before it can ever get to trial, risk getting Foggy sentenced with him for aiding and abetting.

The guards are cold, and cruel, but still—Matt doesn’t see it coming when they turn on him, leading him not to his new cell but into an ambush. He barely has a moment to even register what’s happening before the door is locked behind him and he’s in a room with too many heartbeats to immediately count.

It’s not that Matt considers himself an especially lucky person to begin with, not that he relies on luck when he could rely on himself instead; but he can recognize when good things come into his life that have absolutely nothing to do with him—that have everything to do with chance, or else divine providence, or fate.

And if all the good luck that he was allotted in life was spent up on one event, he’s ok with that. Because getting assigned to Foggy Nelson as a roommate at Columbia felt like a second chance at everything good that had ever slipped through his hands—a chance at happiness that didn’t need to be gripped tightly in his fists or hidden beneath a mask.

Foggy, who  _saw_ Matt,  _really_ saw him; not just for his disability or the cultivated personality that Matt presented to the world, but for who he was, who he strived to be. Foggy, who saw with his heart, like Matt; because for all that light perception is cooked up to be, sometimes, Matt thinks, sighted people seemed not to see at all.

Matt starts counting the heartbeats now, placing the bodies in the space, tasting the cortisol and adrenaline hormones mingling with sweat in the air, his thoughts drifting back to the last time he’d faced this many men, the cavernous space of the sky above as he and Elektra fought back to back on the rooftop where she died in his arms.

Different, he thinks, from the second time she died, ripped from his arms below the earth as the sky fell down upon them—

_Elektra._

It really shouldn’t have come as a surprise to Matt (though it did, it blindsided him) that he would fall headfirst into the life that Elektra could promise him, the life that he had been shut out of as a child; he’d been holding onto it for months, had pressed it secretly, carefully, into the pages of his bible, a paper bracelet made from the wrapper of an ice cream cone—

And if Elektra wasn’t quite compatible with Matt’s inextricable longing to be good, to be so  _good_ , well, at least she knew every part of him, knew intimately his darkness, his grief, his unbearable rage.

_Is she sick? Worse, Matty, she’s in love—_

“You’re Battlin’ Jack’s boy,” says a voice from up above the men, atop some steps, and there’s something about the voice that strikes a chord in Matt’s mind, that stops him in his tracks.

Matt had observed the door behind the man from the moment he’d stepped foot inside, one of three exits from the space. All closed, all locked, all useless. Guards posted outside every door, their pockets lined with blood money, their bodies full of threats.  _Plata o plomo._ Silver or lead. Take our money, or take our violence.

Matt always chooses violence.

“What’s it to you?” he growls, fighting down the feeling that this is all more than it seems, more urgent, more dangerous than he can comprehend right now, with the evidence he has before him. Bigger picture, he thinks, he needs a bigger picture.

“You don’t remember me? I killed your father,” the man says, like it’s the most casual thing in the world, and Matt’s body goes cold.

_You don’t remember me? You killed my father. Well, I hate to break it to you, son, but I killed a lot of guys’ dads. Then let me help you…he hit hard, like this—_

Finally everything comes together to form a memory; Elektra brandishing a knife at Roscoe Sweeney, encouraging Matt to tell him who he was; he could taste salt in the air as he beat the other man until his face didn’t even feel like a face anymore, so bruised and bloodied beneath Matt’s knuckles.

Elektra had disappeared after Matt refused to end it, to cut his throat, the lingering scent of her perfume— _sandalwood, ylang ylang, mandarin leaf—_ the only evidence that she had ever been there, and Matt had hitchhiked and stumbled his way back to the dorm.

He’d had every intention of waiting for Foggy to leave the building before returning to their room, then realized that he’d lost his keys at some point during the hellish evening—or, more likely, Elektra had stolen them as retribution for not complying with her plan; it was the type of petty thing that she would do.

So he had knocked, humiliated, blood still on his knuckles, on his face, mixed with the tears that had tracked their way down his cheeks, and tried to ignore Foggy’s sharp intake of breath when he saw Matt, tried to ignore the uptick in his pulse,  _scared,_  as the law student succumbed to his tendency to babble in distressing situations.

“Oh my god, Matt,” he had said, “you disappeared from the party last night, and I know you can take care of yourself but I’m always afraid you’ve fallen into an open manhole or, like, I don’t know—a sinkhole, because I guess that’s more likely to happen than quicksand, not that I really thought quicksand was an option when there’s wet concrete and—”

Matt had opened his mouth to say Foggy’s name, to reassure him, to somehow make this seem less  _bad_ than it was, but instead he opened his mouth and heard himself say Elektra’s name, in barely a whisper, felt the tears begin to slip out from the corners of his eyes.

He remembered then that the scent of Foggy’s fear had soured into irritation, because he had never liked Elektra, had never trusted her, had warned Matt so many times—and Matt had felt the shame rise up in his throat until he was vomiting into the can beside his desk as Foggy knelt quietly beside him, until the dam broke, and Matt wept wordlessly, his hands aching to feel just  _once_ what it would be like to touch someone and not hurt, not be hurt.

And if Matt had internally railed at the unfairness of it all,—he’d thought  _surely_ by now he would be ok, surely  _by now_ he would have picked up the pieces of his life and fashioned them into something whole, no longer caught in the riptide of shattered childhood dreams and loss—he didn’t let his tongue betray him.

Not the way it once had done when he’d awoken from impressionistic dreams to darkness, calling out for his dad, for anyone at all, and no one came; he’d learned, then, not to burden others with his neediness, with his sadness, with his shame.

_“Matthew?! Oh, you’re Battlin’ Jack’s boy, oh you amateur. Now I know your name, nothing to stop me from bloodying the street with your corpse, just like I did to your old man—”_

The men begin to form a circle around him, and Matt brings himself back to the present.

_"Sweeney,"_ he spits, and he’s almost pleased for the opportunity to face him again, his body aching for a fight after a month of playing domesticated house cat for the cameras in protective custody, for the guards whose daily provocations were their bread and butter.

“Murdock,” Sweeney responds. “You put me away ten years ago, and I’ve been dreaming about getting you back ever since. Then I read about your trial in the paper, and I realized that I could get you back without ever leaving these walls. Only this,  _this_ is so much better than even I imagined.”

“What do—what are you talking about,” Matt bites out through clenched teeth, cataloguing everything in the room that could be used as a weapon, trying to delay the inevitable.

A few inmates have blades tucked into their waistbands, others have half-hazard attempts at weapons—shiv in a toothbrush, sock full of rocks—the rest armed only with their fists and their loathing for Daredevil, armed only with their memories of humiliation and defeat.

“You see, I knew about you, sure, followed along as the media praised the blind orphan with a law degree just trying to do good for his community. Except it turns out  _you’ve_ been doing it with your  _fists_ instead of your law degree—I wonder how your partner feels about that—how your old man would’ve felt about that—”

_“Shut up—”_  Matt snarls, but his words are choked off by his traitorous emotions, venomous but hollow, his hands curled into fists he hasn’t been able to use, his fury uncoiling inside of him until every muscle is quivering and aching to hurt. “Don’t you dare talk about them—”

"Did you know that your partner has personally fought every appeal that I've made in the last ten years?" asks Sweeney, his heartbeat rushing in satisfaction as Matt doesn't respond. "You  _didn't_ know, did you? Guess we're all entitled to our little secrets."

Sweeney draws in an audible breath through his mouth, the sound grating loudly in Matt’s hearing. The other man’s airway is restricted, swollen, the breath struggling to get into his lungs. Calluses line the membranes of his nasal passages from years of inflammation, and Matt realizes that he’d never fully recovered from the beating.

“You’re a survivor, Murdock, unlike your old man. Unfortunately for you, I am, too, and I’ve not forgotten that night. You left me with too many reminders.”

Still, the thought that Sweeney must remember Battlin’ Jack Murdock every single time he takes a breath brings Matt a rush of grim satisfaction.

“You don’t want to make an enemy of me,” he warns, with a note of the Devil in his voice.

Sweeney laughs, but the sound is anything but friendly; some of the men circling Matt begin to laugh as well. He feels like he’s caught in the crossfire of feedback again, shakes his head and tries to focus around the memory of kneeling on the rooftop, Fisk’s voice in his ears.

“No,” Sweeney says coldly. “The mistake was making  _me_ an enemy, was making yourself an entire goddamn  _army_ of enemies and believing you’d never end up in here with them. Did you really think we’d never come back for you, pretty boy? For  _Daredevil?”_

_Daredevil—our true—public—enemy—_

"Ha!" he scoffs. "You've been here thirty-two days, Murdock, and I hear you're already losing it: talking to yourself in your cell, not eating, not sleeping—well, we've been here for  _years_ _,_ so you can imagine that we are _more_ tired, _more_ hungry, for release, for retribution."

Matt’s only half-listening to Sweeney’s dialogue, his senses trained on the men surrounding him.  _Mind, body, connection._ He lets his shoulder blades roll back and down, allows himself to relax into the stance of a boxer as he grounds up through his feet.

“You think I’m afraid of you  _or_ these men, Roscoe?” he spits. “You think  _I’m_ not hungry for a release after thirty two days and nights of listening to all the shit that goes on in this place?” Matt laughs, and raises his fists. “Try me.”

Matt kicks out a leg toward the man closest to him, the sole of his foot connecting with his throat and the man goes down with a harsh choking noise, stays down.

The rest of the men scramble to take their shot at the man who put them away, a shiv slicing through the air toward Matt’s neck as he slips back on his feet, arms up, directing the shiv with his forearm into the man directly behind him, who releases a strangled yell. 

He doesn’t pause to enjoy it, placing his elbows on either side of the shiv inmate and using his momentum to thrust the man face forward into the ascending concrete steps with a  _crack_ as the man’s jaw dislocates on impact.

Matt barely has a chance to catch his breath before he can sense the sock weighted with rocks swinging toward his face, and he’s forced to drop back over the railing to the ground floor again, narrowly dodging the blow to his eardrum. He drops into a roll as he lands, swiping out a leg close to the ground and bringing down an attacker as he spins up to his feet; he strikes his heel down across the man's skull while simultaneously thrusting his hand out in a sharp horizontal arc, connecting with another inmate’s throat.

But there’s too many men in too enclosed of a space, and one of them manages to slip past Matt’s defenses, dazing Matt with a glancing blow across his temple and then grabbing him by the shoulders as he’s thrown back down against the steps.

He hits hard, his senses blurring out of focus for an instant, but it’s long enough that more men are piling on top of him, their hands grasping at his prison uniform, pulling his arms behind his back in a high, painful lock as he tries, and fails, to fend off a storm of blows.

Then the shiv is slicing through Matt’s uniform, drawing a jagged wound across his torso, and he cannot help the gasp that is torn from him as the serrated edge of the makeshift blade catches every bit of sinew beneath his skin, ripping through his insides like a hook.

He thrusts his head back sharply into the skull of the man restraining him and violently wrestles himself free. He fights his way back up to his feet, his breath coming out in gasps, one hand testing the depth of the wound, the other hand numb at his side all the way up to his shoulder.

He’ll survive, he thinks, trembling with exertion and the effort of fighting off the shock that threatens his focus; then he explodes into motion, sidestepping and allowing two of the men to take each other out, swiping out a low kick and releasing all of his rage onto the man who goes down, hitting until he can hear the bones fracturing beneath his fists.

“Careful, Murdock,” says Sweeney, and his voice draws Matt’s attention back to the feeling that he’s still missing something, something bigger, something more urgent, more pressing; only he can’t pinpoint what’s wrong over the sound of blood rushing in his ears, the sound of his own heartbeat pounding against his ribcage.

He tilts his head, struggling to parse through the assault of information on his senses.

_Tap, tap—tap, tap, tap—_

He thinks back to his teacher and narrows his focus, tuning out the heavy breathing of the men surrounding him, the gasping, choking sounds from the men still on the ground— _tap, tap, tap—_ there it is. A tapping sound. Sounds so familiar. Only Matt can’t place it. Another rooftop, he thinks, another lifetime. Karen and Foggy were there, he was typing out a text—

Phone. Camera. Low of hum of video in the corner of the ceiling.

He stills immediately with the realization, and the inmate with the sock full of rocks takes his opportunity; it hits so much harder than Matt expects, and his hands raise to his ears in an attempt to stave off the high pitched ringing that follows.

He catches a sharp heel to his abdomen, then a fist across his jaw as he’s forced to his knees and his head is slammed back against the concrete wall behind.

Sweeney holds the phone loosely in his hand as he begins to walk down the steps, his gait slow, purposeful, restrained. Two men stand behind Matt, holding his arms back tightly; it’s almost unnecessary, so disoriented from the blow to his head that he can barely focus.

“You showed your hand, Murdock, just like your old man,” he says. “Except I let Jack off too easy for what he did. Should’ve waited ‘til he was home, made you watch—sorry,  _listen,_ as the bullet went through his skull, let you try to staunch the blood—”

_“Fuck you,”_ Matt half-slurs, half-gasps, fighting back the too visceral memories of himself as a child with hands so small, too small— _I think that’s my dad,_ ** _I think that’s my dad_** _—_ to be feeling for the familiar landscape of his father’s face and finding a bullet hole instead.

Matt chokes back his emotion with effort, swallows around the sob in his throat, and spits, “You think getting sent to prison was the worst thing that could’ve happened to you? After everything you’ve done—I should’ve, I should’ve—”

“What, killed him?” says a new voice, and Matt feels like all the breath has been stolen from him, feels a terrible cold settle inside of him in its place. “Like you tried to kill me?”

“No,” he breathes.  _No no no no no no no—_

This isn’t real, he thinks, it can’t be; he’s hallucinating again, lost to himself. Poor timing, but that’s par for the course. It’s not enough for Matt to fight enemies made of flesh and blood, no; he must create phantoms to haunt his steps, resurrect ghosts long dead; self-flagellation for the modern penitent.

Better lost to himself than this: ten steps behind with a mouth full of blood and defeat.

The world spins around him as he loses his focus, his tightly wound control over his senses unraveling; the metallic scent of blood on skin, sweat mingling with expensive cologne, adrenaline and arousal, too many heartbeats, too many sounds, too much—

“What’re you—what does, no _—_ ” he tries to say, but his voice falters, trembles in his throat as he fights to get the words out past his lips, their bitter taste lingering on his tongue. Played like a fool. Always the fool. His teacher was right; but his teacher is gone now, for all the good being right ever did him.

_Did Fisk do this to you? Fisk, Fisk, it was all Fisk—_

The low electronic hum of the cell phone becomes a steady droning in Matt’s ears as he struggles to regain control over his senses. Stick is gone, but his lessons remain.

_Mind, body, connection._   _The mind controls the body, the body controls our enemies, our enemies control jack shit by the time we’re done with them._

Matt drops his head down toward his chest, attempting to slow the breaths that hover high up in his chest, fluttering violently like a bird trapped in a cage.

_Pull it together,_  he reproaches himself, when Fisk’s presence cuts through his focus, cuts deep inside of him, as he leans in close, so close that Matt can feel his breath in his ear, feverishly warm, deafening in its proximity, in its intensity—

—and, for some reason that Matt can’t immediately name, can’t quite place, suddenly so much more sickening than the feeling of the blade pressed into his throat, than the feeling of the blood rapidly seeping out onto his abdomen.

“You’re still so naïve, Matthew,” says Fisk, quietly, and Matt cannot help the shudder that wracks his already trembling frame. “There are worse things than death for men like you and men like me. Things unbearable that linger, and fester, and take on lives of their own.”

Fisk takes a step back, raises his voice as he runs his thumb back and forth over a metal cufflink, a rapid brush off the bottom followed by a slow return back up to the top.

“You will wish you had died, died rather than understand what it means to be the powerless observer of your own ruin. To have who you are stripped from you, knowing you could put a stop to it anytime you choose, at the expense of knowing that you’ve put a death sentence on the person you love. The same choice you gave to me. Fair’s fair, Mr. Murdock.”

Matt’s been dealt shit hands before in life, always prided himself on his ability to take the hand he was dealt and shift the cards in his favor, on his ability to hit the mat and get back up again, fists swinging. Now, hysterical laughter bubbles up inside of him. The ghost of his father had abandoned him, it seemed; only fitting that he should face his ruin alone.

_For it is we who haunt the dead,_ he remembers bitterly,  _and not the dead haunt us._

He chokes back the hysterical urge to laugh, swallows back the bile that rises in his throat as Fisk grips Matt’s jaw forcefully in his large hand and tilts it up toward the surveillance camera hanging from the corner of the ceiling.

“They’re watching, Matthew,” Fisk says.  _“Don’t let the Devil out."_

_Don’t let the Devil out,_ he says, and Matt hears the promise in the spaces between the words.  _Or your case will fail before it ever makes it to trial, or Foggy will get sentenced, and worse, for aiding and abetting Daredevil._

_Daredevil—our true—public—enemy—_

He feels like he’s been dropped into the ocean, all his limbs weighted with stones, unable to find which way is up and which way is down, which way is surface and which way is gone. Surface feels like a fairy-story told to children at night, like enchanted forests.

Light as the breadcrumbs which lead the way up, which lead the way out. Light as memory. Light as myth.

His senses so blurred now, the ringing in his ears rendering the men all but invisible to him, if not for their burning touches on his body.

This isn’t real, he thinks desperately, like the child who hides under his covers at night from the monster in the closet,  _if I can’t see it, it can’t be real._  He can practically hear Stick’s voice in his head: snide, cold, dealing out judgments like little deaths, swiftly and mercilessly.

_C’mon, kid. You, more than anyone, know better than that. Get up. Get up and fight back, your soft partner be damned. Just look at you, a trained warrior—and this is what you’ve become. Weak. Soft. Useless. I was right to leave you when I did—_

“Time’s up, Mr. Murdock,” says Fisk, then turns to Sweeney. “He’s yours. Let your men have him, but he stays alive. Or you don’t.”

A litany of no’s are uttered in quick succession, one after another, as if from someone else, though he feels his own lips moving, feels the vibrations in his throat, feels his tongue heavy and dry against the roof of his mouth.

This is the moment when Matt realizes what it means for his luck to have finally caught up with him, the moment when he realizes that there is no such thing as paying his dues, when he realizes that some cards can’t be shifted in his favor.

He'd known the risks of Daredevil, had lived for the risks of Daredevil, thrived in the charged spaces between risks and consequences, walked the tightrope between good intention and self-destruction. So, the consequences had arrived.

_For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but sent them to hell, putting them in chains of darkness to be held for judgment—_

Judgment day.

A memory like the empty spaces between towering edifices, playing over and over—the smells, he thinks, the smells are what linger the most—but no, because it repeats, and this time it’s the feeling of powerlessness, of observing from trapped within his own body—

But no, because the memory repeats, and this time, there’s just nothing there and he thinks, if he could just remember, just  _remember_ what happened, he could put the fragments back together into something that makes sense—

Except that it repeats, and he remembers, but it still doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t—the blur of bodily sensations, the ringing in his ears softening to a quiet drone as nothing happens, nothing, really, because if he can’t remember, then it didn’t, it couldn’t have—

—and then he’s on his hands and knees, trembling, vomiting until there’s nothing left and he’s dry heaving and shaking, and feeling like he should die because no one could  _possibly_ be  _this sick_ without dying, and his body doesn’t even feel like it belongs to him anymore, because it couldn’t possibly, he can’t think of a reason why—

No, he thinks, distantly, what happened—it happened to someone else.

He doesn’t try to focus. There is no  _mind, body, connection,_ not anymore, not when his mind has violently rejected any connection to his body.

In these moments, there are no thoughts of Elektra, or Foggy, or even God; no illusions of a friend or a hero coming to his aid. In his experience, people showing up at the last minute to save the day is a trope strictly relegated to films and books and television shows. In real life, people rarely show up at the last minute to save the day.

In Matt’s experience, no one ever shows up at all.

Maybe later he’ll rewrite the story; give it a better ending, a better beginning, more realistic, more true—something that makes more sense. Mostly, he remembers that it started and remembers that it ended, but remembers that it felt like it never would, and feels like, somehow, it never will.

 

**III.**

 

The night passes slowly. He trades incoherent banter with phantoms and mumbles apologies to ghosts. His body trembles violently, and the touch of his own fingertips feels alien as he presses the blood back into his wounds. He can’t remember why. Memory can keep its secrets, he thinks, as a rat scurries across the floor of his new cell.

 

—

 

Morning brings a kind of clarity. Unwanted, but there nonetheless.

His phantoms (mostly) fade away at the relentless hammering of a bell. Father Lantom lingers. Something to do with Catholic school, he thinks.

“Is there a problem, inmate? Why aren’t you prepared for the count?”

There’s a heartbeat at the entrance to his cell; he probably should have noticed it before, but there are so many heartbeats, and so many voices, and the effort to focus his senses would only draw energy away from the effort to get to his feet without passing out.

“No,” Matt says as he shuffles to stand in front of his bed. He holds his arms behind his back in compliance, gritting his teeth against the moan that rises in his throat. “Sorry.”

“Next time you’re late for the count,” the guard says irritably, his hand resting on the baton at his side, “you’ll find out what disciplinary action means, Murdock.”

It’s a different guard, one he’s never met, so Matt lets it go.

 

—

 

Attending meals is a non-negotiable, apparently. Inmates are not permitted to stay in their cells during mealtimes. In addition to learning that neat fact, Matt also learns that asking questions is considered ‘non-compliance’ and, therefore, also cause for disciplinary action.

The cafeteria is only a five-minute walk from Matt’s new cell, but the assault of catcalls and jeering on his ears, the sudden touches and hisses, makes it feel longer. It doesn’t help that he’s now walking with an even more pronounced limp than what he’d already woken up with, creating a bigger target over his head for taunting and abuse.

He not-so-secretly thinks that the guard just wanted an excuse to use force, but that doesn’t change the fact that Matt ends up on his knees again, unable to defend himself without giving away his secret.  _I am not Daredevil,_ he thinks, swallowing down the burning desire to fight back. It settles in his stomach like hot coals, waiting to burst into flames inside of him.

Sweeney is practically humming with satisfaction when he finds Matt in the cafeteria line, signaling his presence with the pungent, bitter smell of cigar smoke and expensive alcohol. The combination causes bile to rise up in Matt’s throat.

“You look moody today, Murdock,” he murmurs, stepping up next to him so suddenly that it causes Matt take an involuntary step back. “I’m gonna make this real easy for you. This, last night, will just be a taste of what the next few years are gonna look like for you.  _Or,_ you can choose option B. Tell Nelson that I want out, and that I want  _him_  to get me the deal. Fisk can rot in hell for all I care. I’ll even delete that footage—”

All the helplessness inside of him transforms into rage in an instant, so suddenly that it takes his breath away as his hands tighten into fists at his side.

_Don’t let the Devil out—_

“You have no idea what’s coming for you, Sweeney,” he spits, and turns to walk away, but the world spins disorientingly around him in vertigo not felt since he was a child, the fabric of his father’s shirt pressing frantically into his eyes as the blue of the sky eroded away into black, into overwhelming nothing.  _I can’t see,_ ** _I can’t see—_**

He grasps for something to hold onto, something to stabilize himself, but finds nothing, lost in the chaos of noises and smells until he’s slammed sideways into the railing behind them as Roscoe wraps one hand around Matt’s throat and shoves him violently.

His nerve-endings explode in fireworks of searing pain that steal his breath away again.

Then they’re surrounded by guards, their voices raised as they try to get the situation under their control, pulling Sweeney off of him while he struggles to catch his breath. A riot erupts around them. Hands grasp at his shoulders, and then he’s being hauled away.

 

—

 

Solitary.

He barely even notices when they put him in. His mind a constant replaying of his latest disaster, his most recent self-destruction; a litany of no’s like a prayer, his own choked gasps in his ears,  _don’t let the Devil out—_

He leans his weight against the wall of his cell, and slides down until he’s on the floor with his hands pressed palm down against the cold concrete. His side has settled down to a dull ache, but the blood must be seeping out onto his new uniform.

He doesn’t remember what happened to the other one, ripped, ruined; he supposes they must have removed it when they took him to his cell, destroy the evidence—

Time passes slowly.

He goes through all of Foggy’s cases in his mind, but the exercise is pointless, and he knows it. He’s never heard Foggy even mention Sweeney’s name, let alone mention attending any appeals. Beneath the hurt, Matt feels distantly pleased, vindicated, even, that he’s not the only one who ever kept secrets in their friendship.

Still, the secret is out now, and Sweeney knows that hurting Matt hurts Foggy, knows that bending Matt will get Foggy to do whatever it takes to keep Matt from breaking. Fisk may have only used the lowlife crime boss to get his revenge, but Sweeney used him right back. It’s almost laughable; almost.

“In conclusion, ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” he says, to the wall, “I’m the idiot who can fuck things up for the people I love  _even_ from behind bars.”

The sound of footsteps echoes through the outside corridor, and a heartbeat appears on the other side of the bars. A guard, judging by the sound of fingertips brushing against a baton.

“Losing it already, Murdock?” he jeers. “Get up, your attorney’s here.”

Matt doesn’t rise to the bait, doesn’t even shift to acknowledge the guard's presence. He’s found that if he holds himself absolutely still, he can slow the spinning and repress the nausea to tolerable levels, stabilize his core temperature from its mad ricocheting between hot and cold, burning and shivering.

“Hey, you hear me? Thought you were blind, not deaf!” snaps the guard as he slides a key into the lock. Matt hears a soft click as the latch unlocks, and the gate swings open. “Your lawyer’s here and he wants to see you. Get up.”

“I’m staying here,” Matt says. “I don’t want to see him.”

“I don’t care what you want, inmate, because your asshole attorney is threatening to file a lawsuit against this entire prison if he doesn’t see you, and I’m not gonna be the sorry son of a bitch who gets held responsible. So, get up, and get moving.”

Matt doesn’t bother to point out all the lawsuits they would have on their hands if word ever got out about even half of the shit that went on in this place. Then again, the warden seems capable of making anything disappear that he wants to. A veritable bureaucratic magician.

He stands up slowly, pressing one shoulder against the wall for support. He listens as the guard unsnaps a leather pouch, then gestures with a pair of handcuffs for Matt to put his hands out in front of him. Matt pointedly doesn’t react.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” the guard mutters, as he remembers that Matt’s blind. “Hold out your hands, inmate.”

“Is that really necessary?” scoffs Matt. Still, he holds his arms out in front of him, if only to avoid having them cuffed behind. “I was indicted on suspicion of perjury and obstruction of justice, not for running a fight club.”

The irony of that defense isn’t lost on Matt.

“Andyethere you are in solitary for getting into a fight with another inmate. Want to avoid cuffs? Next time, keep your hands to yourself, and keep your mouth shut. Your fancy degree don’t mean  _shit_ in here.”

The cold metal clicks shut around his wrists, and the guard walks him down the cellblock. Matt drags his feet, feeling suddenly furious that Foggy keeps coming back to the prison and risking his safety; doesn’t he understand that Matt  _can’t_ keep him safe anymore—

Can’t even keep himself safe.

He still feels drugged, like he’s only witnessing everything from somewhere inside his own body, not actually living it. Like if he tried to speak, he’d be able to say nothing at all.

The moment they enter, Foggy is all movement and barely restrained displeasure. He stands up, pressing his fingertips against the plexiglass that separates them, the clean scent of his cologne cutting through the lingering stench of the prison, and Matt is grateful for it, for the sense of world stability that is carried with it.

“Get those cuffs off of him,” Foggy demands. “This institution may be in the business of dehumanizing inmates, but he’s a non-violent offender awaiting trial, and I’m here to have a civilized conversation with a human being. Get them off, and then get out.”

The guard’s heartbeat speeds up in a rush of anger, but he complies. The moment he leaves the room, Matt tries to throw a dirty look at Foggy, hopes that his gaze lands somewhere near the other man’s head.

“What the hell, Fog,” he snaps.  _"_ _You_ may get to leave at the end of this meeting, but I  _don’t._ Maybe try not to make me enemy number one of every single guard in here.”

“What do you mean every single guard? Have other guards been mistreating you?” demands Foggy, and his tone indicates that he’s prepared to pick a fight with every single guard that has even so much as looked at Matt since he was transferred.

“Jesus, Foggy,” mutters Matt, and he lowers himself down carefully onto the chair as he exhales slowly against the pain. “That’s the part you hear? I just meant that I don’t need you to antagonize the guards for me on my first day in general population, ok?”

_“Not_ ok,  _Matt,"_  snaps Foggy, but he releases a deep breath of his own and stops pacing long enough to sit down across the table from Matt. The breath hardly helped, Matt thinks, he can still hear Foggy’s heart racing like a cornered animal.

“Matt,” he starts to say, then falters, sits down across from Matt. “Listen. I don’t know what strings got pulled to transfer you to general population, but I’m working on it. It wasn’t a legal transfer. I’m filing a complaint and a transfer back to protective custody while Karen is investigating who’s behind this. In the meantime, I just need you to keep your head down.”

Foggy exhales a loud breath of air, his pulse quickening even more.

“There’s something else I need to tell you,” he says, finally. “There’s someone else in there, other than Fisk, who has it out for you…and out for me.”

“Foggy,” Matt interjects. “I already know about Roscoe Sweeney. It’s fine.”

“Shit,” Foggy curses. “Did something happen between you two? Did Sweeney—are you—is  _that_ why you’re in solitary? Wait, no, did something happen last night?”

Matt’s body goes cold, the memory of a tapping sound suddenly returning to his mind. Like the night on the rooftop with Karen and Foggy, a different lifetime ago, but no, surely—

“Foggy, why—why would you ask that?”

Foggy barely hesitates, but Matt has lived and worked with him long enough to know Foggy nearly better than Foggy knows himself. Foggy  _knows_ something, already knows, somehow, knows that  _something happened—_

“He sent me a text, Matt.”

For one long, disorienting moment, Matt thinks he’s going to be sick. The nausea rises up into his throat, and he forces himself to swallow it down and keep it down. The nausea roils, threatens to rise again, his body burning cold with the effort to keep it in check.

His very own Sisyphean punishment, he thinks. How appropriate. A fitting punishment for the arrogant hero who dared to challenge a god. What hubris, what naïveté.

“What did he send you,” he bites out, afraid that if he opens his mouth any more than this he’ll lose the fight with his stomach. Foggy doesn’t respond immediately, and the nausea is almost too much for Matt. “Foggy,  _what did he send you?”_

Foggy’s pulse quickens as the scent of his sweat begins to sour with fear.

“Just—a text message. What else would he send me, Matt?”

The rigidity of Matt’s posture loosens ever so slightly. He opens his mouth to talk, but for a moment nothing comes out. He licks his lips, and tries again.

“It doesn’t matter, Foggy,” he says hoarsely. “I—just, what did he say?”

A few seconds pass before Foggy answers, and he thinks that Foggy won’t let it go, whatever it is that’s bothering him about Matt’s response. Matt tilts his head back up from the table. Defiantly tries to meet Foggy’s eyes. Probably ends up looking somewhere over his left shoulder again.

“Sweeney was just letting me know that he’s in here with you, Matt,” Foggy says with a sigh, his shoulders collapsing with his exhalation. “Probably trying to make me sweat. But then I get here first thing this morning and they tell me that you’ve somehow already managed to land yourself in solitary. Seriously, Matt, what happened? Did he provoke you into a fight?”

"Nothing happened," Matt says bitterly, fighting back the hurt that it must have been  _his_ fault, that he allowed himself be provoked into recklessness  _again._

“C’mon, Matt, cut the bullshit,” Foggy says, and he suddenly sounds tired. “I know that you know how careful you need to be in here, and I wouldn’t blame you for getting riled up around the guy who ki—”

“There’s no bullshit to cut, Foggy,” Matt snaps before Foggy can finish his sentence. “Nothing happened, ok? So, just, leave it the hell alone.”

His response is too quick, clearly dissembling, disproportionately angry, and Matt knows it.

“Jesus, Matt, do you seriously expect me to believe that? I mean, I know you can’t  _actually_   _see_  what you look like, but, I’m personally having major flashbacks to that time I found you dying on your apartment floor,” Foggy snaps back, leaning forward toward the plexiglass as he lowers his voice slightly and finishes his rant in an angry whisper.

“So, can you, just, for  _once_ in your freaking life be straight with me? Because I really don’t want to drag Jessica or Karen into this, really,  _really_ don’t want to interrogate every guard in here, but if you won’t tell me what’s going on—"

Foggy’s breath is high in his chest, and his pulse is elevated with emotion, but his heartbeat is steady, no hint of a bluff. Alarm rises up in Matt. Foggy can’t. He _can’t._ It would hurt him, it would crush him; it would ruin what’s left of their relationship, it would take away the only family that Matt has left—

Matt curses, pushing himself up to his feet. The world starts spinning again, the nausea clawing at his throat for release, the assault of information on his senses overwhelming. He can barely think, can barely get his mind to stop replaying fragments of what happened long enough for him to catch his breath.

_Because you let yourself get weak, kid; you let yourself get soft, useless—_

“You win, ok? I  _am_ weak,” he snarls at the ghost of his teacher. “Weak, and useless, and every other derisive thing you’ve ever said about me, but it  _doesn’t matter,_ it doesn’t, because these are  _my_ consequences to live with,  _mine. You’re not here anymore."_

Matt redirects his attention back to Foggy, whose every gesture of his body is tense with bewilderment and concern, his hand pressed up against the plexiglass as though, if he tries hard enough, he’ll be able to slip through. Matt licks his lips and laughs.

“Good luck going to the guards, Foggy, because Fisk, he, he still  _owns_ half the guards in here— _they_ were the ones who helped Sweeney ambush me last night, along, along with I, I don’t even know how many inmates, and, because I’m, I’m—I’m still so  _naïve,_   _Foggy—_ I, I played right into Fisk’s hands,  _again."_

Foggy’s lips part, and Matt can hear the uptick in his heart rate, can smell the sourness in his sweat glands at Fisk’s name, sense as the air is rapidly displaced in a sharp intake of breath.

“So now,  _now,”_ Matt raises his voice before Foggy can interrupt, “Sweeney wants to use me to force you into getting him some kind of deal for early release—except that I am  _not_ going to be used as leverage against you, Foggy, so, please, just, just  _leave_ it—”

“Whoa, whoa, Matt,” says Foggy, and even though he’s making an effort to soften his tone, there’s an edge to it, a roughness that Matt’s never heard before. “Can we, just, rewind for a hot second? To when it seemed like, maybe, you weren’t talking to me but I’m also not really sure who else you could’ve been talking to?”

Matt doesn’t respond, his teeth clenched together against any further betrayal of his tongue as he collapses back into the chair. Foggy takes a deep breath, and then plows forward.

“Ok, well, there’s nothing you could ever do to earn consequences like  _this—_ and you couldn’t have known about Sweeney. If anything, that one's on  _me._  But, Matt, I  _need_ you to help me understand what’s going on, or I’m not going to be able to protect you.”

Matt releases a shaky breath; a sound comes out that’s somewhere between a strangled sob and a bark of laughter. No one has ever been able to protect him, and, for some reason, the thought that Foggy wants to, and it’s too late, it’s always been too late for him—

“You still don’t get it,” Matt says, around the sob in his throat. “You can’t protect me, Foggy. I gave Fisk everything he wanted last night,  _everything_ , and the guards—the guards are in his pocket, and now I—don’t you  _get_ it? I don’t want to tell you what happened, I want to  _forget_ that it happened, and I— _fuck—”_

He presses his eyelids tightly shut as tears begin to slip out from the corners of his eyes, presses his fingertips against his eyes and tilts his head away from the plexiglass in a futile attempt to hide his defeat from Foggy’s eyes.

Neither of them move for a long moment.

His heartbreak laid out between them like a white flag of surrender that he never intended to wave. He wonders how many white flags he can possibly have, and how many of them can be stolen from him. How many surrenders he can lose before he loses himself.

“I can’t, I can’t do this, Foggy, I can’t,” he starts to say, but he can barely get the words out. He licks his lips, tries to focus around the sound of his own heart pounding in his eardrums.

“I know, Matt, that’s why I’m here, that’s why I’m, that’s why I’m trying to help,” Foggy says, and his voice is so uncertain, faltering, heartbreakingly gentle. Like Matt’s a wounded animal, and Foggy knows that he might bolt if he says the wrong thing. “But I—”

“No, Foggy,” interrupts Matt, and takes in another breath. He’s tired, suddenly; too tired to maintain this life that belongs to someone else. He’d like to go to sleep now. Maybe just not wake up for a long time. “I can’t do  _this—you—"_

He wearily tries to tune out the sound of Foggy’s heartbeat, stuttering in confusion, for once thankful that he cannot see Foggy’s eyes, and the heartbreak that must be displayed there. But the further away Foggy can stay from this prison, from Matt, the safer they’ll both be. So he swallows his own heartbreak, and says, “I’m serious, Foggy. Please don’t come back.”

He stands up, turns to face the door. Except this time, vertigo doesn’t just make the world spin disorientingly around him; this time, the dizziness slams against him in waves until he’s drowning, lost completely in darkness again with no breadcrumbs to show him which way is surface and which way is gone. His fingertips brush against the cold metal of the door frame as he collapses bonelessly down against the window.

The last thing that he hears is Foggy’s panicked voice from behind the plexiglass, calling his name over and over.

 

**IV**.

 

####  ` **Rampage at Rykers** `

The headline is splashed across the front page of the paper, and Frank makes a soft noise of disgust as he skims the article.

####  ` Matthew Murdock, blind attorney of Hell’s Kitchen, accused of being the vigilante known as Daredevil and being held at Rykers as a flight risk pending trial, has officially been moved from protective custody to general population—where he will now share a cell block with Wilson Fisk, among other convicts put away by Daredevil. A wave of violence is now said to be sweeping through the prison, with Murdock at the center of it. `

_Goddamnit, Red._

“Are you—are you someone famous?” asks the waitress tentatively as she puts the bill down next to his plate. The sound of a scuffle outside catches his attention, and he turns in time to see an addict threatening a young girl with a knife to her throat. His hand flexes at his side. That’ll do.

“No,” says Frank, throwing down a bill as he stands up from the booth. “Keep the change.”

He opens the door to the diner, the soft jingle from above the door frame mingling with the sounds of the assault across the street. He releases a short breath, pressing his lips together in distaste.

“…you be holdin’ that shit back on me, you—”

Frank grabs the druggie’s head from behind and twists sharply; the body drops down to the ground, the knife clattering onto the sidewalk next to him as the girl stumbles backwards in horror.

“Get out of here,” Frank growls, turning his attention to the beat cop who’d been parked down the street but is now running toward them, his gun pointed at Frank.

_“Freeze!”_ the cop yells. “Hands behind your head, you—”

Frank puts his arms up, revealing the Punisher vest beneath his jacket, baring his teeth in a smile as the cop nearly drops his gun, fumbling anxiously with his radio to call for backup. He can see the waitress staring out from the diner window, eyes wide, mouth agape.

“I surrender, officer,” he says. “Take me away.”

 

—

 

Matt comes to consciousness slowly, unhappily, already fighting the unsettling feeling that there’s something he’s supposed to remember, but he’d rather not.

Memory slams back into him anyway, like a tidal wave, leaves him gasping for air. A soft moan slips past his lips as he attempts to raise himself up onto his elbows, his entire aching body a tribute to the word  _no._

He can feel a stitch pulled in the wound at his side, tries not to think about what put it there.

Fails.

Falls back into the loose grasp of fragmented memories: his body walking into a room that he’ll never come out of; the sound of his breath high up in his chest, fluttering, violent, like a bird trapped in a cage—

“I’d take it easy,” says a voice, low and familiar, and Matt suppresses a full body flinch at the unexpectedness of it. He sniffs the air: gunpowder, kevlar, instant coffee. “Nurse said too much movement might cause you to experience worsening symptoms again.”

Matt tilts his head, parsing through the flood of information assaulting his senses. His hands had already closed into fists while he was sleeping, whether because he needed to wake up ready to fight, or because sleep itself was the battle—he’s not sure.

“Nurse also said your eyes might be sensitive to light for a few more days,” the voice says, a note of amusement in its tone.

Matt tries to understand why, still half-gripped in the clutch of his memory. Then he realizes that his eyes are shut, and he flutters them open to nothing. Awake nothing. Settles back into the present. At least the amusement in the voice makes sense now.

The prison nurses still refuse to believe that Matt  _really doesn’t_ have  _any_ light perception. Think he’s some kind of freak who can fake a lack of pupil dilation, but not the kind of freak who can simply function without it. Ableism at its finest.

“Frank,” mutters Matt. “Blind joke. Tasteful, as always. What the hell are you doing here?”

“Hey, now,” Castle replies, indignant. “Heard you were all having a party in here, thought I’d get myself an invitation.”

Matt releases a breath, wonders when his life became  _this._  Thinks it probably began long before he lost his sight, before he lost his father, before he lost himself.

_Be careful of the Murdock boys, they got the Devil in ‘em._

Had he become the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen because the idea had been imprinted in him long before language had found him? Or would he have always discovered this unbearable rage that lives deep down inside of him where language can’t touch—

“I guess the better question would’ve been  _how_ you got in here,” says Matt finally, without emotion, “but I’m pretty sure I already know the answer.”

Frank lets out a bark of laughter, and Matt marvels at his ability to be unapologetically who he is, to see the world so cleanly. Matt’s ability to maintain a concept of self was difficult enough before this; this new judgment day, this thing that has fractured his concept of self beyond what he thought was possible.

How many judgment days can there be, he wonders, how many versions of himself can die—before there’s nothing real left of him?

_I am not—_

“He had it coming,” shrugs Frank; Matt can hear the rustle of his prison uniform moving up and down, Frank’s heartbeat steady as ever, the most stable thing Matt thinks he’s ever heard in his life. “I see in the paper that maybe you’ve gone off your nut in here, Murdock. Creating this 'wave of violence’ they say.”

“So, what,” says Matt bitterly, furious that Frank can be so casual about this, that he can talk about it like he has any idea at all what it’s been like. “You thought you’d come join in?”

“That was part of it, sure,” says Frank. “Seemed a shame to miss out on all this action.” Then he pauses, and Matt can hear his breath faltering for the first time. “But more than that, I wanted to see it for myself.”

“See what?” asks Matt, dreading the answer. His hands are still curled tightly into fists at his side, and he tilts his head away from Castle, jaw clenched, humiliated to be seen this way.

“What it looks like on that bad day when you turn into  _me,"_  Frank responds, and his heartbeat is steady, but it’s always steady, so Matt can’t really be sure that it’s not what the other man intended to say all along. Not that he thinks Frank could know what happened, that he thinks Frank would use that knowledge as a weapon even if he did.

“I’m not,” Matt starts to say in response, then falters, tilts his head away again.

“Like me,” Frank finishes for him. “Yeah, I know. You’ve been spouting that line for as long as I’ve known you, Murdock. And what has it gotten you? Arrested by the FBI, placed with the criminals you took off the street, put in a fucking prison infirmary, and why?”

Matt doesn’t respond. Bites the inside of his lip until he can taste blood.

“C’mon, Red,” Frank says, releasing a frustrated breath as his tongue darts out to lick his lower lip. “A fighter like you, a smart guy like you—a job, friends, a real life—”

“You think I need to be reminded of that?” snaps Matt, suddenly angry. “That everything I do as Matt Murdock, as, as—you think I don’t realize how naïve it is? Because I do, Frank, I know that I do this—I, I take the things I love, and I try, but I ruin them, I never get it right. I just, I make everything worse, and I do this to myself, I  _did this to myself—"_

The words tumble out of him before he can stop them, the headache pounding worse than ever, the stench of the prison mingling with the memories that he cannot push back quickly enough until he’s stumbling out of the infirmary bed as the IV drip is ripped from his arm.

The metallic scent of blood mingles with antiseptic and gunpowder.

He barely makes it to what he thinks is a trashcan before he’s vomiting again, one hand still up to keep Frank away, to keep anyone, everyone away. Except it’s been days since he’s had any food, and there’s nothing left in his stomach but his own blood that he’s swallowed, so he kneels there dry heaving, spitting out blood, his body struggling to rid itself of itself.

He distantly hears the sound of water being poured, and the scent of gunpowder hovers at his shoulder. The soft thud as a plastic cup touches the floor, the scent of chlorine mingling with the distinct scent of polyethylene.

“I think you need to be reminded of  _something,_  I’m just not sure—” Frank begins to say, but Matt tilts his head up in that way that Frank knows means he’s hearing something; something that he doesn't like, his breath rising high in his chest.

A moment later, an inmate appears at the doorway.

“Benny,” Matt bites out through gritted teeth. He presses one hand against the counter, one hand against the wound at his side, raises himself up to his feet. He can feel blood seeping through the gauze, feel the stitches coming apart at the seams. Poetic, he thinks, for a person also coming apart at the seams.

“Yo, Murdock,” says the newcomer, casually, but Matt can hear the uptick in his heart rate as he recognizes the Punisher. “Thought I heard you in here.”

Soon, thinks Matt, hands trembling, he’ll fear the Devil, too.

“See,” says Benny, as he walks over to where Matt and Frank are standing. “You keep  _saying_ you’re blind, Murdock, but somehowyou  _always_ know it’s me before—”

“It’s Tuesday,” Matt interrupts. “You’ve got an appointment at the infirmary every Tuesday. Also, your cologne—I can smell it from down the hallway. It’s not exactly subtle.”

“Hey man, it’s cool,” says Benny, stepping closer. His teeth are rotting from drug use and the strong scent of his cologne barely overpowers the stench of the rot. A druggie, who did far worse things for the habit before Daredevil put him away. Matt swallows down the bile that rises in his throat as his knuckles turn white at his sides.

“Heard you was refusing the drugs they tried to give you in here. That’s some crazy shit, man. So I thought I’d come see if I could take ‘em off your hands, see if maybe you were up for an—”

Benny stumbles sideways before he can finish his sentence, and Matt’s knuckles burn at his side. Frank grabs the convict by his shoulders and slams his head down against the metal counter next to them. Matt can sense the sharp displacement of air as Frank’s hands grasp the other man by the forehead and jaw, starting to twist—

“No, Frank,” sighs Matt quietly, suddenly tired again. “Stop. Don’t kill him.”

Through it all, Frank’s heartbeat hasn’t changed once. But he stops the moment the words come out of Matt’s mouth, and it assuages some hurt deep inside Matt that he isn’t ready to touch. He listens to the sound of Benny’s body hitting the floor, pulse elevated, still alive.

“Now see?” says Frank, and he sounds oddly pleased. “An' here I thought maybe you didn’t give a damn anymore.”

A guard comes running down the hall; Matt can hear his heavy footfalls, his heart racing as he bursts into the infirmary, baton up, the sharp scent of his sweat pervading the room.

Frank steps back with a rustle of coarse fabric as his hands go up at his side in a gesture of compliance. Benny slowly moves up to his knees, groaning, holding his head in his hands, his heartbeat still too fast from the rush of adrenaline and fear.

“Who did this?” the guard asks, still breathing heavily, but no one says a word. “I’m talking to you, Murdock—tell me who assaulted this inmate!”

“No one, C.O.,” says Matt, his head tilted in the direction of the far corner. “He just fell.”

 

—

 

The next time Matt runs into Castle, he’s drawn together the fractured pieces of himself into something resembling a less broken man. And so what if he’s done it with anger, with rage. _I don’t want to be a person,_  he remembers reading once,  _I want to be unbearable._

“You got a plan?” Frank asks, as he sits down next to Matt in the cafeteria. For the most part, nobody else bothers him anymore; Matt has personally filled the infirmary with the bodies of every single inmate who thought they’d try him on for size. Since that day. Judgment day.

“Working on it,” says Matt. “It’d be easier if we weren’t on a fucking island.”

“No sweat, Red,” Frank says. “‘Cause  _I’ve_ got a plan. You didn’t think I’d get myself arrested without one, did you?”

Matt’s first instinct is to lay down the law _—no killing, Frank—_ but he bites his tongue.

It’s not that he doesn’t have morals anymore, but he’s lived within these walls long enough to understand that he can’t play moral absolutist and survive with any part of himself still intact.

So when a riot breaks out, orchestrated by Fisk, no less, and Matt has to save the warden’s life,—despite all the shit that the warden’s let happen on his watch—he stops to grab a rifle from one of the men he’s just taken down, and makes his way down to Frank’s cell.

When Matt arrives, a little more bloodied and a little more bruised than when he started, he finds the Punisher leaning casually against the wall behind his cot, reading a book. Matt tosses the rifle to him, listens as the weapon lands solidly in Frank’s grasp.

“Time to go,” Matt says, his grin bloody, and entirely too pleased, Frank thinks, like the cat that got the mouse. Still, a feeling of something like pride swells up in him—

“C’mon, Red,” he says, checking over the weapon. “Let’s get out of here.”

Frank presses the muzzle of the rifle against Matt’s neck as he leads him down the cellblock and away from the rioting. Matt’s mumbling instructions under his breath,  _left, left, right, go, stop, ok, go,_  until inmate and “hostage” are up on the roof of the prison.

At the helipad, Frank threatens to kill Matt, then the pilots, if they don’t drop their weapons, disembark, and get down on the ground. Not quite  _plata o plomo,_  but they choose the not quite silver over the lead.

All in all, a nearly perfect escape.

 

—

 

They land back in Manhattan, and Matt finds that his morals return along with his footing on solid ground, back in the real world, the world that his father belonged to. Not the world they just left, which already feels like a distant dream. Surreal. A nightmare to forget.

“You’ll be okay?” he says to Frank, after they disembark. Matt can hear the sirens echoing across the buildings less than a mile away. He estimates that they’ve only got about a couple of minutes before the entire police force descends on them.

“I can slip away without hurting any cops, if that’s what you mean,” Frank says pointedly.

“That is what I mean,” Matt admits, and Castle lets out a bark of laughter.

“You’re still predictable, Red,” says Frank. “You’re all right, I think you’re gonna be just fine."

Frank tosses something at Matt; his hand automatically darts out to catch it. A cell phone. He tilts his head at Castle in confusion, running his thumb along the screen as though he’ll somehow find the answers there.

“Thought you might want that,” Frank says, and there’s something strange in the tone of his voice that Matt can’t quite identify. “Took the liberty of deleting everything that was on there. Didn’t think you’d want it getting into the wrong hands.”

“Frank, I,” Matt starts to say, his mouth suddenly dry as he understands what he’s holding, understands the strangeness in Frank’s voice. The sound of tapping from somewhere above him followed by the low hum of video. His breath fluttering high up in his chest like a bird trapped in a cage. Fisk’s voice cutting through the noise—or did that come later?

_Don’t let the Devil out—_

Matt swallows back the fragments, releases the breath that is caught in his throat. The other man is watching him; Matt can sense the stillness in his posture, the steadiness of his pulse, even as the echo of sirens gets closer and louder.

“I never thought I’d say these words,” Matt says, “but…thanks, Frank.”

“Not necessary,” says Castle in response, then his breath catches, as though he wants to say something else. “You’re hurting a lot right now, Murdock, with good reason. We don’t get to pick the things that fix us, but you don’t want to be me. You just needed to remember that.”

 

**V.**

 

When word gets out that Matt was taken hostage by the Punisher, the public takes up a cry for mercy; and when word gets out that Matt was attacked while in custody, a blind lawyer illegally transferred to general population pending trial, the public nearly takes up arms.

The days following his exoneration, Matt stays at Foggy’s apartment. The press have gotten a hold of his address somehow (Foggy is furious), and are hounding him at all hours (Foggy has so many lawsuits against so many people now).

Matt sleeps badly, his hands curled into fists at his side, dreaming not of what happened but of sensory fragments out of place in the backdrop of something else; he wakes up again and again, white-knuckled and trembling, ghosts of names in his mouth that never touch his lips.

Silence settles into his throat and makes a home there.

Karen shows up on the second day, unwilling to wait any longer to “see Matt whole” with her own eyes—and if Matt doesn’t contest the word ‘whole’ in connection with his name, it’s not for lack of wanting, as he tries desperately to let go of his crumbling identity before it crushes him in its collapse.

_I am not_ —

Video surveillance is leaked to the media of their escape, grainy footage of Frank Castle with a rifle to Matt’s neck, says Foggy, over the narration done by the newscaster:

_“…and managed to commandeer a helicopter to escape the facility. Murdock was being held at Rykers pending trial in federal court on charges related to the accusation that he is the vigilante known as Daredevil. However, as you can clearly see, Murdock appears highly confused and helpless, nothing more than a blind human shield for the Punisher. And with repeated sightings of Daredevil in the Clinton area of Manhattan while Murdock has been behind bars, the question of who Daredevil_   ** _really_  ** _is appears wide open to debate…”_

It’s funny, Matt thinks, how if you repeat a lie enough times, you almost start to believe that it might be true—funny, how it starts to take on a life of its own. He studiously ignores the phantom that hovers at the edge of his consciousness, carefully avoids saying its name.

_“I never thought a blind man awaiting trial should be in a federal penitentiary, not with the allegations made against Murdock…and all the people the_   ** _real_  ** _Daredevil has put here. But in my personal interactions with him, and in video surveillance during his time here, which I will be releasing to the media, I have not seen one thing that leads me to believe Murdock is anything but an innocent man wrongly accused.”_

It seems that saving the warden’s life may have saved his own. The footage is released to the media, as promised, and there’s absolutely nothing in it from that night, nor his subsequent attempts to exorcise himself and the other inmates of their demons.

With the warden of Rykers attesting to his innocence, the media finally stops hounding Matt with questions about Daredevil’s identity. Plus, there’s  _apparently_ the empirical evidence that Daredevil was spotted out Daredeviling in Hell’s Kitchen while Matt was in prison.

(No one asked you to but, thanks, I guess, Danny.)

Sometimes Matt hears or senses something that brings back flashes of a locked room, some fragment of a memory that takes hold of him for long enough that Foggy notices, that Foggy suggests talking to someone—but there’s only one person Matt thinks he could have let in.

Someone who knew enough context to understand the layered truths of it, someone whose calling it was to listen to the awful things that happen, without judgment or pity, someone who  _knew_ him, knew him from  _before—_ and that person is gone; collateral damage, not even an afterthought.

The thought of having to start at the beginning with someone else, to tell the whole story all over again in a way that makes sense, fragmented as it is in his memory, omitting the truth about himself, about Daredevil—it’s asphyxiating, it’s paralyzing, it’s better to just leave it.

If he dilutes himself any more, he thinks, there’ll be nothing real left of him. Just an illusion. Nothing but a construct made up of the parts of him that are palatable, or else lies.

Or maybe he’s already there.

He tries to think of what happened objectively, and if detaching himself from the trauma means that he detaches himself from his own body, well, that’s a problem for future Matt.

\- Matt Murdock was attacked, outnumbered, outsmarted. (True)  
\- Daredevil has saved countless victims. (True)  
\- Daredevil couldn’t save Matt Murdock. (True)  
\- None of that makes Matt Murdock responsible for what happened to him. (Lie)

He decides to stop composing what he likes to call his “three truths and a lie” lists when he recognizes his distinct lack of objectivity, which is mostly because Jessica calls him out on it and then elbows him so hard that Matt gets a cracked rib.

_That’s victim blaming, asshole, and I know you’d never pull that shit on anyone but yourself but it’s still not ok—_

Matt stops by a few nights later with an expensive bottle of whiskey as a peace offering and a note with an apology. He leaves them outside on her windowsill, figuring the best gift of all is to not to force Jess into a human interaction.

As soon as the media storm dies down, Matt returns to his apartment, tries not to fill every inch of the overwhelming space with his inescapable self-doubts. It’s over, again; Fisk is still behind bars, and Matt is out, but—he can’t shake the feeling that, somehow, Fisk still won.

 

—

 

Nelson, Murdock, and Page slowly regain their footing, as well as an office that’s  _not_ a deli.

Matt is mainly thankful that he no longer has to see Foggy’s family every day, manage their stifling concern, sustain the exhausting façade that he’s fine, really—the media exaggerates, nothing much happened; he mostly just waited in a cell for a month and then Frank Castle showed up and that was that. Destroy the evidence, rewrite the story, it never happened.

He can tell that they never quite believe him but the lie gives them all something resembling comfort, so they settle into an uneasy truce; he goes through the motions, furiously throws himself into his work—and it almost makes up for the feeling that he’s absent from himself, that he still can’t catch his breath. As it turns out, he observes, living feels a lot like drowning.

 

—

 

June fades into July fades into August; a lethargic blur of heatwaves and thunderstorms that never quite manage to cut through the mugginess that clings to the sidewalks, the scent of overripe fruit mingled with car exhaust and sewage.

Everything feels fragile, and he waits for it to shatter. When it doesn’t, he keeps going.

Nights he lies awake, listens meticulously to every noise in Hell’s Kitchen; catalogues every heartbeat, every breath. Wanders through his apartment like a ghost until the mask goes on and his hands curl into fists, and he leaves helplessness behind, leaves himself behind.

 

—

 

Fall tiptoes in late, mild, a brief respite between extremes. Mild, he hears them say on the weather stations. Meek, his mind supplies helpfully. Something to do with Catholic school, he thinks, the thought evoking the memory of a persistent bell.

No, he corrects himself, that isn’t quite right; the bell came later. Something to do with a hymn. A May Crowning. The Virgin Mary. Children’s voices in a cathedral, and orange slices after mass.

He walks by the church sometimes after work, but rarely steps foot inside.

Still, the scent of incense clings to his skin and his fingertips ache for days to touch the worn elm of the pews, to run his hands along the carved patterns in the wood the way he’d done as a child, restless and impatient and attentive to all the wrong things.

 

—

 

“Do you still pray?” his mother asks.

“Sometimes,” says Matt. He finds no comfort in it anymore.

 

—

 

He goes out one night as Daredevil, hears the sound of panicked breath fluttering violently like a bird trapped in a cage, and—something inside of him, something that he hasn’t been able to name or touch, just, it howls and it finally breaks loose.

Instead of the calm that used to descend on him as he exorcised himself and the city of their demons, he listens as his own breath climbs high in a near perfect imitation.

He tosses a billy club, then follows, dropping down into the alleyway where the panicked respiration echoes back off of brick walls and Matt feels like he’s caught in the crossfire of feedback between the present and the past, the sound of his own breathing harsh in his ears, and he can’t discern whether that’s the sound of his breath now, or then.

He shakes his head, like he’s trying to clear water from his ears, and releases his breath in a sharp exhalation, tightens his grip over his focus and listens.

There’s another heartbeat, irregular, pounding in a different way than the sluggish panic of the woman, whose heartbeat skipped once and then slowed again at the appearance of Daredevil. He tunes her heartbeat out, focuses on the man who is stumbling back up to his feet, a slow drip of blood now trickling down from his ear.

Matt leans down, retrieves his billy club and tucks it back into his belt, curls his fingers into fists at his side.

“Stay down,” he growls, but he knows that his words will fall meaningless on deaf ears. The man’s blood is rushing, and Matt can taste the alcohol that clings to his skin, to his breath, through the thick stench of arousal and sweat, cigarette smoke and expensive cologne.

The man rushes forward, and Matt can hear the soft  _snikt!_ of a switchblade being released, tracks the movement, prepares to sidestep and guide the blade away from himself; but the sound of his own breath, high, fluttering, violent, like a bird trapped in a cage, echoes loudly in his eardrums and he suddenly falters, barely catching the man’s arm.

_Mind, body, connection,_  he reminds himself—but he’s spent so much time carefully detaching the connection of his mind to his body that his senses only stutter in response.

(The problem for future Matt has been rapidly becoming a problem for present Matt, but he’s handling it, he thinks irritably. And, he is, if his quiet, single-minded refusal to accept that the problem won’t eventually, just, go away on its own, can be called handling it.)

Matt grunts as the man’s elbow jerks back into his jaw, the switchblade still gripped firmly in his hand; he stumbles back against the jagged brick wall, his muscle memory the only thing keeping him on his feet as his mind drifts away, removed, considering other things.

Light as memory. Light as myth. Light as the breadcrumbs that lead the way out of the dark forest. Only, he thinks, light is a memory and a myth that he will never recover from, ever; a trail of breadcrumbs that he will never be able to follow up to the surface.

The way a child goes back to his home as an adult and sleeps in the same bed, and the closet is still full of monsters, only now, now he knows that just because he turns away, because he closes his eyes, doesn’t mean that he cannot still be eaten whole: teeth, skin, and bones.

So, this is real, Matt thinks, as the man swings a bottle at his head, and this time, he doesn’t have to play the game, doesn’t have to witness his own undoing from somewhere deep inside, from somewhere far above; silent, compliant, someone else.

Or,  _or_ he could let it play out, see how it ends this time, see whether Daredevil can save Matt Murdock after all. At the very least, he can replace the empty spaces and the fragments with something real, something that belongs to him, something he can name.

He lets the moment pass; the bottle connects with his ear, and Matt drops to his knees as the switchblade comes up to his throat.

“Who the  _fuck_ —do you think you  _are,"_  the man slurs belligerently into Matt’s face, pressing the switchblade so sharply against Matt’s throat that he can feel the skin breaking, can taste his own blood in the air.

It’s the question combined with the alcohol on his breath that causes nausea to rise up in Matt’s throat like an animal clawing to get out, the sound of his own breath distorted in his ears, so that he can’t tell if it’s  _now_ breath or  _then_ breath.

No one, thinks Matt, suddenly tired, he’s not anyone anymore, who  _does_ he think he is—

And then the man is grasping at the base of Matt’s skull with his free hand, his fingertips intertwining painfully with his hair, believing that he’s had all the fight gone out of him.

Matt almost believes it, himself, spent, exhausted from the accumulation of days and nights that feel like they belong to someone else. He releases a breath as his fists loosen at his side in surrender, his fingertips brushing lightly against the outside of his thighs.

_Get up._

Surrender is easy. He can reach out with one hand and touch it. It follows him like a shadow. He bats it back several times a day. Not now, he says to it, it’s not a good time. Maybe later. It belongs to him, takes up the space of all the parts of him that were left behind, dead weight thrown overboard in a futile attempt to somehow make it out intact.

To linger was to drown, to resist was not an option that was available to him. Simple as that. No room for bravery.

_Get up._

He thinks back to the room, considers its significance in his memory, like another character in a play; harmless on its own, he supposes, just another room: four walls and cold concrete beneath his palms—he wasn’t always there, kneeling, lost, swallowing defeat like hot coals.

**_Get up_ ** _—_

Memory of a voice sharp as splintered wood; his hands tighten into fists as he grits his teeth and forces himself into motion, knocking the switchblade from the man’s grasp with a sharp strike before dropping him down to the asphalt. He releases an audible breath like a moan with every impact of his fist until he can taste salt mingling with blood on his lips.

Then he distantly registers the sound of the woman dialing 911,  _tap, tap, tap,—_ distantly listens as she struggles to describe the situation to the dispatcher and Matt forces himself to drop his fists and step away, his breath coming out in gasps.

“Wait inside the bar until the police arrive,” he hears someone say. He doesn’t recognize the voice as belonging to Matt or the Devil. He doesn’t know who the voice belongs to anymore.

She takes a step toward the bar, but collapses on the steps, and he realizes suddenly that no one else has exited or entered the bar in the time that it took for this scene to unfold and play itself out. An entire tragedy could be lived in this darkness, unwitnessed, unnamed.

_Oh cunning wreck that told no tale,_  he thinks suddenly, the memory of an Emily Dickinson poem beneath his fingertips,  _and let no witness in._ Shame settles in his stomach, battles with the grief in his chest, both howling for release, for language, for touch, for anything at all.

Sirens wail in the distance.

He bites back a sob and stumbles over to where the woman had collapsed on the steps, lifts her gently up by her shoulders to lean against his own. Bigger picture, he thinks, he finally gets the bigger picture—why her heartbeat had been so slow even as her breath climbed high in her chest, violent, fluttering. Despite all that, she had stayed, witnessed, tried to help.

So he stays there with her until the sirens are echoing off of the buildings around them, and a familiar heartbeat steps out of a car.

“She’s been drugged, Mahoney,” Matt says, allowing Brett to take the woman from his arms before stepping back, his hands raised. “GHB, I think. She needs to get to a hospital.”

“I’ve got her,” Brett says. “EMTs are on their way. You don’t look so hot, yourself, Daredevil.”

He lets out a strange sound, somewhere between a laugh and a sob, and limps away.

 

—

 

Matt catalogues his injuries as he climbs up onto the rooftop—glass in his knees, laceration from the switchblade, jaw bruised, hearing distorted. Nothing that’ll kill him, so he rolls his shoulders back and starts jogging across the rooftop, gaining momentum as he goes until he’s leaping over and across the empty spaces.

The adrenaline fades as he goes, leaving behind a coldness, a hollowness in his chest.

He makes it back to the rooftop of his apartment before pulling the mask off of his face, the salt of his sweat and tears stinging with the rush of cold air. Gripping the mask tightly in his hand, he swings open the roof access and stumbles down the stairs to his living room.

He pulls out his burner cell and begins dialing Foggy’s number, but his fingertips stick to the buttons, still wet with the blood that drips from his knuckles, and he immediately hangs up, throwing the phone violently away from himself. It clatters loudly against the wall.

He regards the empty room, takes a step, and reaches his limit.

He can’t take another step. Not a single step. He drops to his knees on the hardwood floor as the grief that howled and broke loose in that alleyway climbs up his throat and settles there until he’s sobbing quietly into his hands, his fingertips pressing into the corners of his eyes as though he can staunch the flow of tears, his breath coming out in desperate gasps.

_Foggy. Foggy. Foggy._

Matt’s cell phone rings from across the room. He doesn’t move from his spot on the floor. Feels more at home now than he’s felt in months, in this space that’s not quite living room, not quite stairs. Where he’d pulled himself up off the floor, and dusted himself off.

Where he hadn’t pulled himself up. And hadn’t dusted himself off.

Where he’d followed Foggy’s movements as he’d paced and paced, until he’d had his fill of Matt’s secrets, of his lies, until he’d stormed past the ice cream wrapper fashioned into a bracelet, still sitting atop his kitchen counter like a warning, like a promise.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

_Foggy. Foggy. Foggy._

Matt feels shame settle into his stomach again, feels guilty for shutting Foggy out, but he’s been down this road before; the first few days where he’s regarded with sympathy, and with understanding, then the days turn into weeks and the weeks turn into months, and the sympathy turns to impatience, and the understanding sours into irritation and judgment:

How sad that he’s still stuck in the past, how sad that he can’t let himself move on from what happened; doesn’t he understand that no one wants to hear about it anymore, doesn’t he understand that he’s upsetting people, doesn’t he understand that they’re only saying this because they care about him?

He’s too tired to create an explanation for why he’s still struggling, one that is fit for public consumption, understandable, not fraught with distasteful connotation—

It’s been months now, nearly a year, so if he still wakes up trembling with the taste of salt on his lips and blood in his mouth, he doesn’t care to mention it.

_Foggy. Foggy. Fog—_

(Since when is Foggy the “public”, the rational part of Matt thinks, before it is buried beneath the avalanche of self-doubt, the ever crumbling edifice of his identity.)

Yes, he’d lived for the charged spaces between risk and consequence; but that was then, and this was now.

Now, he feels like a poor imitation of the person that Matt Murdock used to be, relegated only to the spaces left behind in the wake of his own self-destruction where there’s no room to breathe, and no room to be. A ghost inhabiting a body that doesn’t belong to him, equal parts haunted and haunting. Self-imposed exile of the self.

_I am not—_

Sudden knocking at the door; he stifles the urge to jump out of his skin.

“Matt? Hey, buddy, it’s me,” comes Foggy’s voice. “I just called. You home?”

He can hear Foggy pressing his ear against the door, then placing his spare key into the lock, narrating as he goes and the world around Matt seems a little less dark. A voice like surface, he thinks, like breadcrumbs. Light as language, light as touch.

Light as the breaking, which leads the way up, which leads the way out.

“Ok, honestly, I never really know if silence in this apartment means ‘go away, I’m busy’, or if it means ‘I’m bleeding out on the floor’, so, I’m coming in, Matt,” Foggy calls, then pauses as he enters the apartment and takes in the scene in front of him.

“Hey, Foggy,” Matt tries to say, going for nonchalance but falling very short of the mark as his voice trembles, ragged, more breath than tone, and all that comes out is, “Fog—”

“Matt,” he breathes. “I’m here. Are you ok?”

Foggy’s heartbeat is quick, and scared, but it’s the familiarity of it, like the night at Columbia with mingled blood on his hands and salt on his lips, it’s the fragile tenderness in his voice that finally breaks Matt. He cannot stop the tears anymore; they fall, and he lets them.

Displacement of air as Foggy kneels down next to him. “Matt?”

Matt opens his mouth to say something, anything, but no words can make it out around the grief that has settled in his throat, around the silence that made its home there. A sob rises up in his chest, and he shakes his head. Thinks of memories like the empty spaces between towering edifices, of trapped birds in cages and locked rooms he never left.

Violence an uncurling of fists, absence, apathy. Speechlessness dark like drowning.

“Foggy, I can’t,” Matt gasps, his voice breaking. “I can’t catch my breath, I can’t—there’s something _wrong_ with me, Fog—what if this is who I am now: no one, nothing, just this, this paralysis, this lack of myself—it won't be enough, I’ll never be enough now—”

I’ll never be enough now, he says, and thinks: this loss has swallowed me whole, the memory of it will never leave me, the memory of nothing at all. How do you recover from that?

“You’re enough, Matty, you’ve always been enough,” Foggy murmurs, and his voice is reverent, and quiet, and he touches Matt’s hand with his own, and the touch doesn’t hurt, and Matt’s name sounds like a prayer in Foggy’s mouth, like breadcrumbs, like surface, like light.

 

 

—

 

_“A not admitting of the Wound_  
_Until it grew so wide_  
_That all my Life had entered it”_

_—_ Emily Dickinson

 

_—_  

  

 

**Author's Note:**

> This story started as something shapeless, what it would look like if Matt’s identity was revealed, if he were sent to prison for it, an exploration of trauma and memory—how he would navigate these things, how it would affect his ability to live with his conflicting identities; how he would be able to find a way to move forward if his only template is what barely worked for him in the past; how to find some way of coping that’s sustainable, how to redefine what survival means for him. 
> 
> Then I watched S3, and, while doing some research, stumbled across Brubaker’s Devil in Cell-Block D run, which lined up eerily well with what I’d already written of Matt in prison. However, the Brubaker run also gave me the framework to get Matt out of prison without losing focus on Matt’s character arc, gave me the means to reintegrate Matt back into "real" life. 
> 
> Quotes:
> 
> “The pagans onstage made pagans of the audience.”  
> —Thomas Kelly, on Stravinsky’s _"Rite of Spring"_
> 
> “For it is we who haunt the dead / and not the dead haunt us.”  
> —Anne Ridler, from _“Dead and Gone”_
> 
> “I don’t want to be a person. I want to be unbearable.”  
> —Anne Carson, from _Decreation_
> 
> “Oh cunning wreck that told no tale / and let no Witness in"  
> —Emily Dickinson, from _“A great Hope fell”_
> 
> “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”  
> —Dante Alighieri, from _The Inferno_


End file.
